This was today at about 4:15 pm. I had to move slightly to avoid getting the realy bright sun burning through the centre of this shot.

& This was yesterday at about 3:30 pm, while it was still snowing. I think we got about 10 centimeters ( 4 inches) of snow here before the precipitation turned to freezing rain and then rain. Today’s expected high temperature was supposed to be up around 10˚C/50˚F.

— What a difference a day makes? Yesterday started off pretty darned cold and ended up around midnight with freezing rain right around zero degrees Celcius / 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Today it’s flirting with ten degrees C / fifty degrees F.

I found this on a facebook page called “Ancient Celts” along with several other pretty darned nice photos of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and a lot of red-haired kids and ‘grown-ups’ and a couple cute young kids in kilts.

— & some of the photos I found on the facebook page “Ancient Celts” are pretty spooky – The image I carried around in my imagination for years that represented the first chapter in my “Great Un-Amerikan Novel” was a tree ( on a hill ) being hit by lightening. Another photo on that site looks like the north coast of ‘Shamrock Island’ in the game world I’ve been building for years (with a little bit of much appreciated help from my friends). — I tried to use the above photo as the ‘icon’ for this page/blog. It didn’t translate as well as I hoped.

— & Today, I was pretty close to exhausted when I forced myself out of bed to shovel some very wet heavy slush out of our driveway so Cathi could get out and go to work. { She actually thanked me for that? I might have wanted to ‘shoot the messenger’ / grumbled at anybody who did that for me. 😉 }

— And – I’ve got stuff I gotta do – so I better keep this short today — “Aboo Niesh Day!”

The CBC – Canadian Broadcasting Company – encourages regular people to send in photos and videos. I hope this is not to cut down on the number of employees they might otherwise need to pay to do that.

— It just took me two hours to wade through a lot of beautiful and sometimes disturbing tweets. Eek.

– Thomas Jefferson – Author of many famous quotes, including “Banking Establishments are more Dangerous than Standing Armies.” Who’d’a thunk an Aries could be so prophetic?

— I was the recording engineer for an interview between Dr John Battista – a Psychiatrist and Green Party Activist in Connecticut – and David Cobb – a Texas Lawyer who was part of a group that had researched the history of corporations in the United States – and that group was fighting against Corporate Fascism – David Cobb, I do believe, ran for President of the USA as the Green Party Candidate in 2004 – After I had followed my heart to Canada and was trying to first become a permanent resident, and later, a dual citizen of the US & Canada. In 2004 I couldn’t leave Canada – unless I wanted to start the long and expensive process of applying for permanent residency all over again.

— & speaking of evil corporations – Canada has ruled that cable teevee providers must offer channels that they currently only offer as part of bundles – and so lower the cost that consumers need to pay to get what they want. Rogers Cable is blitzing the airwaves with propaganda commercials trying to lure customers into falling for their – “Get our packaged bundles now and lock yourself in to wonderful lower prices for three years!” b.s. — And Bell Aliant – who promised us three years of low prices and later informed us that we misinterpreted what they told us – had MTV in our channel line up on Monday, and no MTV was there on Tuesday, when the Shannara Chronicles air. So I guess that proves that Bell is definitely on the side of the demons that the ‘Druid’ and the three young hero types in that series are trying to defeat. Yup, Bell is probably one of the bad guys.

Michael Moore has another movie about to come out. He’s gotta be one of my favourite people.

— The Mouse that Roared? In Reverse?

– Well, a groundhog with a social conscience? – Hmm – Don’t’cha wish the politicians and oligarchs who want to rule over you and run your life had as much intelligence and compassion as this guy? 😉

— Your government is lying to you. They want you to voluntarily give up every right and privilege you have. They want to say you voted away your rights. They want to be able to point their fingers at you and say, “They made me do it-” & When they get to Hell, they want to show the devils there that they really were on the side of darkness and deceit, so they can get a job as one of the demons torturing the decent folks they deceived into backing policies and programs that drove other good people into despair and economic slavery.

But New Brunswick had a spectacular sunrise this morning, and this person from Fredericton caught it digitally on her camera.

— Today’s weather report, “Well, this afternoon we will experience Winter and by tomorrow it will feel like Spring.”

And here’s a bit of daily inspiration from Roy Bennett.

— I do like to have at least something positive to add any time I go through the trouble to write up what I see coming at us via the ‘Tweet-Us-Sphere’ and in real life beyond.

And if thoughtfully reassuring words can’t inspire you right now, maybe a photo like this can –

— Looks like another place I’d like to visit and stay for a while.

— But I have other real world stuff to attend to, so I better end here – Have a wonderful, spiritually enlightening day –,

— I received email from someone who has sent me a link to her page of mostly positive predictions for 2016 and into the future: The link is coming up :

— Link —> http://www.auracolors.com/blog/general/2016-predictions/ <—

— Graphic Image from the page linked above —> ⇓

“Indigo-Cosmic” Image from the 2016 Predictions page linked above.

— The person who made these predictions seems to be plugged in to the same desire to refocus our consciousness from the current trends in media toward more positive and empowering subjects – the same desire I have been trying to embody here in this blog.

I will try to send her a link to this article and hope she is pleased with what I’ve said here.

If you try to change the world with intellectual arguments – the next person who challenges you will change it their way. If you try to change the world with love – you just might warm the world for a while. If you change the world by connecting to Divine Spirit – no normal human being can undo that —

— I froze my fingers clearing snow from our van this morning. Then the snow came down too heavily and the wind blew a little too insistently, so I figured it would be stupid to argue with Mother Nature and came inside. I puttered around and did a few things, right now I can’t remember what – and then decided that a nap would be the best thing I could do. I dreamed I was a newspaper reporter at some kind of function where somebody claiming to be an F.B.I. agent walked away from any group I approached. And then one guy in an expensive suit, wind blown blond hair and a Hollywood smile and sunglasses took me aside and told me he was giving me his notes and I should run with his story – it would establish my career – I typed up three pages – on wrinkled and half torn paper – and was proof-reading what I’d typed when I woke up. I woke up with a headache.

— So I took an allergy pill and a calcium-magnesium pill, drank some coffee and got dressed in snow-blowing clothes and went out and cleared a lot of our fairly long driveway, thinking it would be a lot easier if the love of my life hadn’t decided to get us a house that did not have a garage. But anyway – on the strange side, the plow that usually gives us a three feet high mountain of snow at the end of our driveway hadn’t plowed all that close to our driveway’s end, he cut the corner several feet out into the road, but he must have gone by fast – he shot some large *chunks of ice several feet into the driveway (*chunks? more like boulders? -some of them a foot long and maybe eight inches high & eight inches deep – irregularly shaped – at least they were not sharp edged – but they did threaten to wreck the snowblower’s blades.) I think it took me an hour to clear most of the driveway and clear a path to the hill beyond our porch where starving deer come every day and night looking for anything they can eat – and then, after I realized I’d done as much as I could, I put the snowblower away and came inside, filled a bucket with oats and carried that back out to the deer hill – tossed a lot of oats to where the deer should be able to get at it with very little trouble.

— And then, I sat down and watched our ‘trouble-is-my-middle-name’ orange cat strut his waddling walk by me – and I sat there, smiled and told him, “Thank you for enriching my life – All pets should be immortal, or live at least as long as we do-” And he glanced over at me with a disbelieving look in his eyes, and I thought he might be telling me, “Get over it – All cats are the chosen ones and if we grace your lives with our presence you should feel honored, and feed us unending supplies of cat treats and pet us whenever we want to be petted and leave us alone whenever we decide that something over there is more interesting than you are-” But then he smiled at me, might even have winked, and ambled on to go find a nice, interesting box to sit in.

— Yay! I actually said something that wasn’t entirely negative – even if it wasn’t an entirely wonderful day. 🙂

— The universe is responding to my desire for positive inspiration. “How to raise your vibration” is a Facebook community. A friend of mine liked the following message at the right time while I was checking things. The images below were copied and pasted, so what looks like links won’t work that way.

— I’m hoping I can pop at least one positive, reinforcing message in here every day.

We are happy to discover that Mister DiCaprio seems to be legitimately concerned with social issues and Civil Rights and Equality and stuff like that.

— Friday night I sat down and started writing – finishing up a section of a Novel I’m at least ambiguous about – I’m in a bit of a quandary over whether it generates enough light & understanding without following the usual formula – The likeable character with his or her butt in a bear trap & you’re supposed to keep the readers in suspense until the end when the character either escapes alive or doesn’t. There are already enough things over-stimulating our adrenal glands with hard pounding fast action. Can I hold anybody’s attention with a story that does not want to blow anybody’s nervous system all the hell? Anyway – I just about passed out at the keyboard around 7:30 am – Saturday morning – and plodded into the other room, climbed into bed and did not immediately fall into a deep and peaceful sleep. We got up around 1 pm and had several things we had to do – drive to a supermarket and buy stuff we’d almost run out of and stuff like that.

— When we got home we had more stuff we had to do, attack some wood and cut it up for the wood stove so we could save the roughly four times the cost of burning wood if we heat using the over priced utilities here. And I think we discovered that the television series Manhattan, with excellent acting and writing and plot twists and all that. Cathi also wanted to listen to podcasts we subscribe to, several people talking about their predictions for what might hit the fan this year. It looks like Elitists are plotting to try to destroy the economies of most ‘Western’ Nations so they can manipulate more and more people into voluntarily surrendering more and more of their rights and freedoms – But anway, Cathi conked out and I sat there and watched all ten episodes of season two of Manhattan and thought those actors, producers, directors – all of them – deserved accolades and all kinds of prizes. But then again it was after 7:30 in the morning before I conked out and again, I didn’t get the deep revitalizing sleep I needed –

— Sunday we didn’t have as much we had to do and that’s a good thing – we kind of took it slow and I did get a little bit of rest, but one of the times I woke up from a short nap I was too busy thinking about where my story line was going, and needed to go work on that, and had some pleasant diversions from friends on the internet and I felt pretty good about things, I started working on one of my web pages that needed help and a lot of things went off the rails with that, browsers crashed, updated web pages refused to display their new content correctly- stuff that said it was uploaded and working on the web loaded out of order on the pages I was working on. That was weird. I had to go in and make sure my browsers knew not to load anything from their memory cache, the refresh/reload buttons were supposed to take care of that, but with Mercury Retrograde – and whatever else was going on in the world wide web – that just wasn’t happening. I think it was after six a.m. on Monday morning when I reached a point where I thought it wasn’t 1,000% perfect, but it was a lot better and if I didn’t quit there, I’d pass out on the keyboard and wake up to find several pages of weird random letters appeared and kept on printing themselves ad nauseum. – depending on where my forehead or other body parts hit the keyboard when I passed out – 😉

— This morning – Monday mornings we put out the garbage and recycling, and Cathi has to get up and out to work, has to leave here between 7:30 and 7:45 to avoid getting stuck behind school busses and get herself to work on time. I start the van every morning so it isn’t freezing when she has to rush out of here, and if the windows were coated with a lot of frost, we – or she – or I have to scrape windows so she can see where she’s going and get there in one piece – alive and on time. We did get her out of here – It was actually something like 8˚C / 48˚F – well above freezing, but it was raining and thick patches of ice between here and where she works would be dangerously slippery, so she left as early as she could. And then I made the mistake of sitting down at the computers and checking the pages I’d fixed over night. They still weren’t acting right. The dog and the cat came around to let me know it was time to feed them, then came around again to let me know they needed to go outside if I didn’t want to have to clean up messes on the floors in here and stuff, and I think I decided I needed a break whether web pages were more than 90% fixed or not –

— Again, I didn’t get deep and peaceful sleep, but it was deeper and closer to peaceful than it had been all weekend.

— The dog woke me up around 7:30 p.m. Cathi had come home, done a few things, taken a nap and was busy with her stuff on her laptop and the nightly television shows that help her unwind.

— I felt weird – like I could force myself to wake up completely if my life depended on it. I kind of stumbled around in a near trance and did manage to do stuff – get the firewood ready and check the things that needed to be checked and yup- the animals were okay, Cathi was okay – There was rain water on the floor in the basement where the strangely warm weather had given us wetness instead of a lot of white mess – but things did not feel right. It almost felt like I woke up in a parallel world where things weren’t quite the way they were in my familiar world. It felt like one wall was maybe half an inch closer to than it should have been, so the door couldn’t quite open all the way when I had to get past it to get down in the basement to check on puddles and important stuff like that.

— & Listening to news about David Bowie’s death seemed a bit strange too. All the teevee news stations were giving that ‘story’ a lot more time than I expected, interviewing Canadian Astronauts and half the musicians in Canada – and it felt like they were canonizing Bowie with praise and distinctions I thought John Lennon or Paul McCartney or one of the original Rolling Stones would get – I was thinking that David Bowie, with his “Chameleon” redefinitions of himself every year or two was given credit for starting cultural trends that I was pretty sure he picked up on and personified, became a leader of a ‘movement’ that had started without him – He might have given MTV Holy Hell for not broadcasting music and videos by ‘Other than White’ musicians and groups way back in the beginning – but he did not stick his neck out and threaten the ‘Establishment’ and ‘The way it’s always been & we like it that way’ the way John Lennon did – Bowie might have made it more socially acceptable to act and wear stuff that bent the weird old rules of gender classification and did things that, for instance, gave Boy George the confidence to be himself when he broke into world wide acclaim – But there will probably never be any Conspiracy Reasearchers delving into the possibility that he was killed by somebody who had been targeted, trained, conditioned and activated in a ‘Manchurian Candidate/ MK-Ultra’ type program to go out and assasinate him.

— I took a nice long soak in a hot bathtub, almost fell asleep there, realized the water had cooled considerably, got up, drained the tub, turned on the shower and warmed myself back up- dried myself off, stumbled around a lot less trance-like, found “Cat People / putting out fires” on You tube and suffered through idiotic YouTube commercials before I could blast it almost loud enough to disturb the neighbours – If this was summer time and any windows were open, that might have been a concern – but – Yeah – I could shed a few tears and feel like DB had given me, and the greater world around us – a lot to celebrate and a lot to think about while he’d been with us.

— But I still feel a bit strange. I woke up in a ‘place’ that felt like an alternative dimension this evening, and now David Bowie gets to wake up in a really altered dimension – hope it’s a much higher world he’s graduated to –

This is today’s Dharma Quote of the Week. I get these through my email since I subscribed at either their facebook page or on Twitter. Some quotes are better than others. And I’ve been warned that trying to ‘digest’ one school’s philosophy while embracing another can lead to ‘spiritual indigestion’. All true Religious/Spiritual sects/schools/systems come from the same Source. Their messages vary according to the culture and times in which their Truth was delivered to the disciples & citizens of which ever region the Inspiration was delivered to.

— The weekly email comes from:Shambhala Publications <shambhala@email.shambhala.com> which has a presence on both facebook and twitter.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

This was the example post that came with this WordPress blog when I activated it. – I had recently had an annoying problem with another ‘premium’ Hosting service that I’d paid for and nearly lost the WordPress blog I had started there with the intention of trying to keep its content purely positive so I could send friends there who might want to know I was doing well, and didn’t need to know about any of my rants or darker moments.

I learned how to copy a whole blog and ‘port’ it over to another blog. And, after I tried that and it worked I felt pretty good and then went to other blogs and copied much of their content, and made sure the dates the original articles were posted remained, and/or any new date (the date of the copying) was edited back to the original date of the original article/post.

And recently – In January of 2016 – I had a positively inspiring day communicating with a new friend and decided to go back to this blog and fill it with positive stuff.

7:30 am – Three deer looking a bit scruffy as they get ready to shed their winter coats. This photo was ‘auto-adjusted’ in PhotoShop. That made the greens looke a bit greener. There still is plastic inside the windows, which shows up more obviously when the photos are full size. At 549 x 412 pixels here, it’s about 1/5th the full size.

There are at least two groups that seem to consist of a mother deer and between two and four yearlings, -depending on who comes with them?- Sometimes I only know there are more than one group is when I notice that one of the mothers has a straight line scar on her right flank. -Either a scar or a very weird bit of fur trimming.-

All 4 deer are in this photo. The middle two are pretending to be a Dr Doolittle type ‘PushMe-PullYou’, The one in the back is on guard, looking away from the camera while the one in the front is busy enjoying the oats I tossed out on the hill about an hour before they came around.

— These photos here are the size I usually upload 549 x 412 pixels or pretty close to that. I told the inner workings of WordPress that ‘medium’ sized photos should be 549 pixels wide because anything bigger than that does not fit right if I copy and paste them into a couple other blogs that I sometimes post in every day, sometimes once a month or once a week? But, anyway, it’s the middle of May. The grass is beginning to turn green. Spring is here. I think we survived another nasty winter. The last bits of snow on our property melted just before Mother’s Day again this year. The bad guys might be trying to bluff us into believing most of the world is going bankrupt while they’re “laughing all the way to the bank”. The sun felt warm even through the windows and across the room. & The guy who owns the field the deer are in either came here and cut the tree that fell down last summer in the Storm they named “Arthur” or paid somebody to do that.

— I can’t think of anything clever to finish this off with just now. Still kind of ‘shell shocked’ over the death of a pet. It feels like life goes on – and silly me, after a couple “Near Death Experiences” myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll see those pets again in the ‘next life’ — But that didn’t make it any easier. And every time life drops one of its ‘little surprises’ – all of our priorities seem to come up for review and have themselves reshuffled. You find out again who your real friends are and suddenly you’re locked in an echo chamber where ideas like: “Nobody ever comes back from a near death experience with the Divine message that they should have spent more time at work-” reverberate in your body, mind and spirit as if they’ve been double or triple underlined.

Moe in February of 2006 – Hanging out atop the hideout we got for Sasha, who died of a heart attack after being with us for less than three months. Sasha was a bit timid and Domino was much bigger than she was and he played a little too rough for her.

— Yesterday was my cousin-in-law Joe’s birthday.

— Also yesterday, & totally unrelated to Joe’s birthday, my stomach was sore. fter a while I felt a bit like I might be sick if I tried to do too much, and defined ‘too much’ as ‘trying to do any more than I already had, folding up a big tarp and moving it under the section of unfinished plywood roof that had blown off the frame I was building around the steel yard shed. -The plan was to finish building a protective wood shed for our firewood, outside the steel tool shed. Because we couldn’t finish the woodshed before we were inundated with snow last winter, and because the second part of my pension is in orbit somewhere, we couldn’t afford another cord of firewood, so it cost us at least $300 more a month to heat our house which meant we couldn’t pay a couple other bills which meant- anxiety for mon amour fou.

— Last night I dreamed I was doing yoga stomach lifts. I dreamed that I remembered having done stomach lifts the day or night before and I wondered if that was why my stomach hurt. (Probably not- my stomach probably hurt from crying over our cat’s death, crying to the point where I burst into coughing fits, which probably strained my stomach muscles.) Today I wondered if part of the reason I took Domino’s death so hard was I saw him suffering through his last couple days. Maybe that hurt me more than it did him. He complained, meowing mournfully just a little bit louder than he did when he was upset because a door was closed and doors just shouldn’t be closed. That’s part of many cats’ philosophy. Some doors should never be closed. Some doors should always be closed, but some should never be closed. He also meowed fairly loudly and stared at things that maybe he could see and we couldn’t, halfway up the wall in the living room and other spots around the house.

— Last night before we went to bed, Cathi told me she’d found a photo of Moe from 2004, so maybe he was a couple years older than the “8 years old” she’d reported online somewhere a couple days ago. I went digging through old blogs and found evidence back as far as 2005 and she checked out her old bravenet blog and found the passage she’d written there and posted in April of 2004, the day after she brought Moe home from the shelter. -( my stepdaughter, Cathi’s daughter, Erin, had fallen in love with Max a scrappy little British grey cat, partially because he was an older cat and she was worried that nobody would want him. I’m really not sure of all the details, but I think we were in the Ottawa animal shelter to pick up Max when one of us blurted out the fact that Sasha had died of a heart attack shortly after we brought her home. The right person at the shelter heard that and told us she would give us a voucher good for a replacement for Sasha. We brightened, asked about possible replacements who might be there that day, and we were introduced to Moe, who’d been left off outside the shelter, who seemed to like and get along with all the other animals in the shelter, but who had a cough and needed to be ‘fixed’. Before they ‘fixed’ him they carried him around and brought him up to the doors of several other cages, he said hello and didn’t pick any fights with any of the cats there. Cathi remembered that they handed Moe to Erin and he leaned on her shoulder and gave her a hug. Cathi believes we have a photo of that somewhere on her backup drive. Anyway, I’m about to copy and paste the entry that Cathi found last night. )-

I don’t think this will print itself twice here, but I better check to make sure.

Sunday, April 25th 2004

12:17 AM

Welcome Tigger!

Mood:

Music: The Chieftains

Weather:

The rain has stopped, but it’s a cool cool wind that blows. Oh well, it was still a lovely day. Yesterday was also a lovely day, and with it came the happy arrival of Tigger, the cat formerly known as Morris (for lack of a name), now healthy and happy and anxious to be away from cages. The trip home was fun; he delighted in sticking one red-haired nose out the holes and talking to me the whole way.

At first he was happy to be segregated in the bedroom, lying in front of the windows watching the world go by. But it wasn’t long before he made the great escape through my legs to rush out and then, with Domino meowing at him through the vent outside, Jim figured we might as well introduce them. There was no hissing, no howling, just a sniff of noses and Domino going shrug and turning around and going downstairs. This looked hopefull. So a few more breakout attempts by Tigger resulted in one very fast cat finally making a break for it and exploring his surroundings. He loves the windows, and he Domino had some minor “words” when he went down into Domino’s lair in the basement. So, back to the bedroom. This wasn’t Tigger’s idea of fun though, so after an hour or so of “scratch scratch scratch knock knock knock!” out he went again. Domino was waiting for him, belly up in the hall and when he was let out, Domino led him downstairs.

Last night to give Domino a break, Jim stayed with Domino behind a closed door downstairs, Tigger stayed upstairs with me, walking across my keyboard, knocking down photos off the piano (he learned that is a loud and clunky thing to do, hasn’t been up there since), played with little guy’s puzzle, played the piano, and spent several happy visits on my lap giving me hugs. He does give good hugs.

And last night, against his will, back behind closed doors in the bedroom. He was up on the bed, curled up between my legs (exactly the same way one of my other cats used to ), and then, on the pillow above my head, purring purring purring. That’s how I fell asleep, to the wonderful sounds of cat purring. Did you know that the frequency of cat purr is supposed to be very healing?

Anyway, that lasted until about 6:30 with Domino outside meowing, Tigger inside knocking on the door, so okay, out again. I know, you’re supposed to keep them separate, but these fellows like each other, both are up to date on shots, Tigger is healthy again so I wasn’t too worried. All day today we have had two cats following each other around the house, wrestling (they are so cute doing that, no teeth, no claws, just literally wrestling), sharing Domino’s futon, admiring the birds together, complete with Domino cleaning Tigger. Yes, I think we have two buddies – Domino is still dominant (he did try his hissing routine and Tigger didn’t bat an eye at it, so Domino is happy), Tigger is so happy-go-lucky and friendly, he’s just happy hanging out and playing. All is well with the world, and Domino is also a much happier fellow today . He really did miss having another cat around.

Other than that, well, we checked out some garage sales, drove over to Galletta (very neat little town), plan to go back and check out the flea market tomorrow. Jim has been busy building cat perches with carpet reminants (some given free, some pieces 50 cents from a new store here); was a little too cool to work on the yard like I had planned, but maybe later in the week.

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I began this life about 50 miles East of New York City, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and would probably be a suicide statistic if it wasn't for the 'Real' friends I made in Vermont, New Hampshire & upper New York State. Being creative and sensitive has its ups and downs - mostly up lately- loving life and love in Atlantic Canada. :)